Carla Emery started this book as a self-published, mimeographed manual in 1969 and kept expanding it for the rest of her life. The result is roughly 900 pages covering nearly everything a self-reliant household might want to do for itself — canning and root cellaring, raising chickens and a milk cow, growing and saving seed, making soap, butchering, baking from scratch. More than a million copies later, it remains the broadest single-volume reference in the field.
It is not a book you read cover to cover, and that's the point. You keep it on the shelf and reach for it the week you finally try pressure canning, or the spring you put in a first garden, or the day someone hands you a flock of hens you weren't expecting. It rewards you slowly, over years — which is exactly how real self-reliance accumulates, one skill at a time rather than in a single weekend of panic-buying.
We recommend it as the anchor of a home preparedness shelf: the book that fills the gaps between more focused titles. If you're working through our Food and self-reliance guides, this is the reference that will still be useful a decade from now.
